Wildflower Composers Festival Concert: With The Bergamot Quartet

The concert will be the culmination of the intensive 12-day Wildflower Composers Festival program where the young composers will have engaged in daily seminars, taken composition lessons, learned from experts about compositional topics like film scoring and writing with text, and workshopped their compositions with professional performers. The new pieces that they have created will be premiered and recorded at the July 18 performance. No tickets or pre-registration is required. “Wildflower is one of the most supportive and exciting spaces that I have gotten to be a part of,” said Wildflower alum and 2024 intern Cece Olzewski, who is now studying composition at Northwestern University. “Every seminar leaves me feeling inspired to get writing.” The 13 young composers come from around the country and have had a varying range of experience with composition. This year, composers have had the opportunity to work with the Bergamot Quartet, an all-female string quartet, to workshop and premiere their new compositions. Wildflower Composers was founded by Dr. Erin Busch in 2018 as the Young Women Composers Camp (YWCC) as a way to address the gender disparity in contemporary classical music. A 2023–2024 season analysis of the top 111 orchestras in the world found that 92.5% of the pieces performed were composed by men (Donne - Women in Music, June 2024). Wildflower was founded as a way to combat this statistic and to actively work to build a more diverse and equitable future for music-makers. Since their founding in 2018, Wildflower has run a summer festival each July and has facilitated more than 150 world premieres. Wildflower has also cultivated relationships with many arts presenters in Philadelphia and beyond to offer regular performances and paid commissions to their alumni pool, including the Women's Sacred Music Project, Network for New Music, the University Choir at Penn State, the UUCWC Crossing Chorale, the American Mavericks Project, and the Relâche Ensemble, among others. “Female and gender-expansive composers remain significantly under-represented in classical music,” says Erin Busch, Founder and Executive Director. “Wildflower provides a unique and welcoming space for these young musicians to experiment, and it’s always exciting to see how their ideas develop when they are in community with one another.” For more information about Wildflower Composers visit [hidden] or email Erin Busch at [hidden]. More Info below.